


iterate

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Dubious Consent, Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, POV Second Person, Replacement Proko, Typical Existential Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:37:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6535408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He says he’s mastered resurrection, but that’s a lie. You’ve never been dead. There’s another version of you that won’t ever come back to life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	iterate

**Author's Note:**

> done for a tumblr prompt 'K/Proko Someone's Greatest Fear' for elusive, though, uh, you can only really see the prompt if you squint ':^) 
> 
> usual thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for beta'ing and all her support

Sometimes, even the illusion of autonomy is too hard to keep up with. When passenger-side complicity gets too much, you crawl between the Evo’s seats to lie down in the back. If the pulse of the engine lines up with the music, you can feel the thrum resonate in your skull, overpowering and distracting, crowding all other thoughts out of your head. It makes you feel pleasantly distant as you stare up at the car’s ceiling. There’s a dent, though you’ve forgotten whose fist put it there, and an old, red smear on one of the door handles. Probably a sign that the car’s time almost up; soon it will be good for a single evening’s entertainment, a brief memorial bonfire held in its own heart, and then it will be replaced.

Kavinsky hits a bump in the road just to make you jolt, his crooked grin gleaming at you in the rear-view mirror. “You shouldn’t fall asleep,” he tells you, “You keep saying you don’t like where you go.”

It’s true; you prefer to pass out these days, because sleep is a restless mess of nightmares. Not that Kavinsky’s thought to ask the obvious question yet: what do dream things dream about?

He takes you to the dregs of a party, or the loose arrangements of a future one. It’s one of the unsellable industrial lots that Henrietta abandoned, a wide space host to tantalizing rumours of chemical waste. With no young prince to sweep in and make it something beautiful, the job of repurposing the lot fell to whoever felt like taking it up. Kavinsky actually used the word ‘upcycling’, once, while throwing an empty keg out a window. Jiang had laughed. You had tipped over a can of paint and kicked it across the floor, watching it spill out unevenly over the floorboards. The trail’s still there, along with a hundred white footprints and the crushed, shrapnel remainder of the can.

There are other people around, faces you recognise, names you should know, but no one Kavinsky’s paying attention to and so no one worth remembering. Most hail Kavinsky on arrival; someone calls out a greeting to you, too, and a haze of malformed memories flickers behind your eyes. The words he’s saying are foreign, unfamiliar, and you stare as you try to parse it. A spark drifts around in your head, hopelessly disconnected, a thought that didn’t get copied with the rest. You manage to catch it; his name is Yuri, and you used to be close to him because he was the only other boy in Henrietta that spoke your language.

Bitterness closes your throat, and you turn away even as he calls out to you in more choppy sentences. You can’t speak Ukrainian anymore. The words in your head come out a garbled mess of hard consonants, an approximation of language that doesn’t mean a thing. You suppose you were complicated enough without it.

You haven’t told Kavinsky that you know Bulgarian now. It’s an unfair trade.

You find the others on the frame of an old sofa, all that survived Kavinsky’s last party. Skov’s eyes flicker uncomfortably over you, lingering at your neck, before he looks away. You don’t blame him; you’ve got more bruises than freckles, marks left by teeth and tongue over every inch of you. Possessiveness is a game to certain kinds of people, and Kavinsky has always been competitive.

“K,” Swan greets. “Proko.” His voice is even, but he leans away, just a little, when you drop onto the frame beside him. They know what you are, and it hasn’t been that long yet. They’re still getting used to you. At least your memories of _them_ are sharp, the two years you’ve known them clear enough in your mind that you don’t find any gaps.

You’ve known Kavinsky three years, but you don’t trust your memories of him.

It’s not a night for a party, because too many people outside the five of you actively attend school and aren’t willing to fuck themselves up on a weeknight. You light a fire in a trashcan, Kavinsky conjures a better couch, Skov is sent to buy actual, real snacks with actual, real money because Kavinsky’s not in the mood to turn his alchemy into a grocery run.

It’s a lazy night, and you smoke what you’re given and you drink what you’re handed, and you ignore the way the rest of the pack carefully, completely keeps their distance from you. They probably miss the ‘real’ one. The person you approximate. You don’t actually know which pieces of you got left off, just that the old version was so irreconcilably wrong that Kavinsky went with the scorched earth approach. Tear you to nothing; try again.

He says he’s mastered resurrection, but that’s a lie. You’ve never been dead. There’s another version of you that won’t ever come back to life.

You watch the drift of the moon through shattered warehouse windows, the crackling fire a perfect match for the pleasant curl of smoke in you. The shapes of the shadows lure your mind somewhere far away, even as Kavinsky drags you up against him, his grip less than casual while he snaps and laughs and threatens the strung out kids that keep approaching. They’re incredibly good at finding him, though his miracle pills always want to be found. He knows to keep his stock away from you, or you’ll get out of your head and never come back.

The night lasts exactly as long as Kavinsky’s attention span. When his fingers start to crawl over your collar, nails scratching edgily at your skin like you can offer what he needs, you know it’s time to leave. The other three stay by the fire as it burns to nothing, and you get a jealous flash of staying with them to watch the ash. When you were one of the pack, and not just Kavinsky’s. But he crooks his finger, and you follow him to the Mitsubishi, loyalty built into your bones.

You hate his house, and you hate his bedroom, and you hate that he _knows_ that you hate it and brings you anyway. Probably, if you didn’t care, then he’d favour other rooms. But this is where he made you, and this is where he killed you, and this is where he keeps bringing you, a display of dominance that you would still submit to him without.

The first things you ever saw were his smile, complete and satisfied; the uncomprehending stare on your own face; the first shot through your head, and two more to make sure. It’s not your blood staining the wall, but a DNA test might disagree. Even as he backs you onto his bed, it’s the memory of a gunshot that fills the room, a ricochet that never really ended. He doesn’t like your attention on anything other than him.

You don’t have it in you to say ‘no’ anymore, the word stripped from your tongue at your earliest stage. You still don’t have to say ‘yes’.

It doesn’t make a difference.

He reminds you when you choose to forget, what the things that matter are: his hand on the small of your back when you’re in a crowd, his thumb crooked around your throat when you’re with friends, his breath in your ear when you’re alone, the whispered rush of drawn-out syllables that would mean something if you were brave enough to string them together.

You know this is why you had to be replaced; the greedy touch of his hands still speaks to a denied need finally being full. Every moan he wrings out with you makes him smirk, satisfied. Your surrender is a victory. This is when it’s easiest to lose yourself to what you were meant to be and pretend you’re not still perilously imperfect. If you can prove yourself here, cry out at the touch of his teeth and let the feel of him set your skin on fire, then the rest of your faults might be worth less.

It’s not really about _you_ , in your specific incarnation. When he’s done and he looks at you with a lazy fondness, he’s seeing Prokopenko, someone between who you are and who he used to have. It’s enough to make you shiver, roll away from him, put your back to the bloodstains. Dawn is creeping over the hills, but you’re too tired to fix the curtains and Kavinsky’s left, his restless engine churning on.

What do dream things dream about? When sleep hooks into you, hungry and inescapable, you don’t sink back into your own head. You go to his. You return to the wicked place of thorns and glass-eyed monsters where you were made from nothing, a forest that snarls at your presence and howls at his.

You were in the woods in his head for infinity, longer than either of you were alive, and you’re wrapped up in a dozen thoughts that you never had. His love for you is caustic, burning through your skin, draped over every inch of you. That’s why he bought you back; that’s why he waited until he had a replacement before he got rid of the real one.

That’s why you know, eventually, he’ll get sick of you. He’ll want to get closer to the original, and he’ll only ever get further away.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feel free to come talk at me on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


End file.
